Apple Ending Development on Aperture as Upcoming Photos App for OS X Will Replace iPhoto

Apple will no longer continue development on its professional photography application, Aperture, reports The Loop. Instead, the company is working on the Photos app for Mac that it introduced during the Worldwide Developer's Conference.

Quote:

"With the introduction of the new Photos app and iCloud Photo Library, enabling you to safely store all of your photos in iCloud and access them from anywhere, there will be no new development of Aperture," said Apple in a statement provided to The Loop. "When Photos for OS X ships next year, users will be able to migrate their existing Aperture libraries to Photos for OS."

The Photos app, which was shown off only briefly during WWDC, will combine with iCloud Photo Library, replacing both Aperture and iPhoto. While Photos will allow users to store, search, and edit photos via the cloud on Apple devices, it is unlikely to include the more robust, professional-oriented tools found in Aperture.

Aperture, which has long lagged behind competing software like Lightroom from Adobe, saw its last major version update to 3.5 on October 22, 2013, and since then, the software has seen just one last minor update. One of the major complaints about Aperture has been its infrequent updates, and many users have wondered if and when Apple would release Aperture 4. With no plans to continue development, professional photographers will want to find another solution, such as Lightroom.

According to TechCrunch, Apple will continue to provide compatibility updates to allow Aperture to run on OS X Yosemite, but development will stop.

I'm glad they're streamlining the (very) bloated iPhoto and providing a better integrated solution, but this really shows how Apple is turning it's back on professionals (hell, even prosumers), who were the main reason Apple and OS X gained popularity early on.